Tim O'Rourke - Dead Flesh

“I thought at first that maybe we should wait for the Elders to give us some sign,” I said. “But look around you, there are plenty of signs that things aren’t right.”

“So what are you gonna do?” he smiled at me with that smug grin of his and I remembered how often I’d wanted to knock it clean off his face. “Investigate?”

With my fist clenched and knowing that he was trying to bait me, I said smiling back at him, “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“How?”

“I’m going to advertise — I did it once before,” I told him.

“What, like a private detective?” he chuckled to himself. “You are taking this whole Miss Marple thing way too seriously.”

“Well anything has got to be better than just moping around this place and sweeping leaves up off the drive,” I snipped back at him. “I haven’t been raised from the dead to do nothing. While I’m about it, perhaps I should advertise your gardening services?”

“I ain’t no gardener!” Potter growled at me.

“No?” I smiled smugly at him. “Where has your fire gone, Potter? Where’s the fight gone? These days you’re as wet as those leaves you stand and rake into a pile. I need more than that. I might be dead but I need a life. I miss my old life. I don’t have any of my belongings, they’re all back at my flat in Havensfield — along with my old life where I was once a cop, but that’s hundreds of miles away from here. I don’t even have my badge anymore. I just want a little bit of that life back — I want to feel like Kiera Hudson again. Can’t you understand that?”

Potter threw away his cigarette end and looking at me, he said, “Kiera, you can’t have that life back — it’s gone. Can’t you see that? You ain’t a cop no more and neither am I. We’re nothing more than ghosts. We shouldn’t even be here — we’re dead.”

“But we are here in this fucked up world that we’ve come back to!” I yelled at him, my fists clenched. “And I think us coming back has changed things and only we can put them right again.”

Potter looked back at me, then rolling back his shoulders, his wings unfolded from his back. “You stay and do the whole Murder-She-Wrote thing, but I need to get away from here.”

I reached out, but before I’d had the chance to touch him, Potter had rocketed away, up into the clouds, which covered the sky like a dark blanket. I looked at the statue again and knew that I was right, however odd my theory was. Whoever the girl had once been — she had now turned to stone. What she had been doing in the grounds of Hallowed Manor, I didn’t know. But something told me that finding her out by the summerhouse was a sign. A sign of what? I didn’t know that, either. Until I found out, I decided that I would keep this to myself. I didn’t want to alarm Isidor or Kayla any more than I had to. Whoever the girl had been, she was now just a harmless piece of stone, and it wasn’t as if she was going anywhere.

After Potter had flown away, I headed back to the manor to find Isidor slumped on the sofa reading a book, and Kayla folded up in an armchair, listening to my iPod. She had it up so loud that I could hear that she was listening to The Wanted sing Lightning .

As I entered, Kayla yanked the earphones out and looked at me. “You look upset.”

“Potter’s gone,” I told them and Isidor glanced over the top of his book at me.

“Gone where?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” I said and flopped into one of the armchairs.

“When is he gonna be back?” Kayla asked, turning off the iPod.

“Don’t know that either,” I shrugged.

“Why did he go?” Kayla shot back, and I could see the glint of intrigue in her eyes. I couldn’t blame her; Potter deciding to take off was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to her since coming back.

“I think, like all of us, he’s having problems adjusting,” I said.

“I’d have problems adjusting too if I came back from the dead to discover that my name was Gabriel ,” Isidor smirked from around the edge of his book.

Ignoring his comment, I said, “What are you reading?”

“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” he said, holding the book in the air so I could see the front cover.

“Good,” I smiled.

“Good?” Isidor said, cocking the eyebrow with the piercing.

“It might come in handy,” I said back.

“How come?” Kayla asked, shooting a quizzical look in my direction.

“I don’t know about you guys,” I said, “but I’m getting fed up with sitting around here every day, twiddling my thumbs. I need something more than that — I need to get the old brain matter working again.”

“So what have you got in mind, Kiera?” Isidor asked, placing the book to one side.

“I’m going to write an advert offering to help people with their problems,” I explained to them.

“What sort of problems?” Kayla asked me, screwing up her face.

“I don’t know — anything I guess,” I said.

“You know you’re just gonna attract a whole bunch of pervs,” Kayla grimaced.

“We don’t have to respond to their emails,” I said. “We pick the cases that sound most interesting — unusual!”

“When you say ‘cases’,” Isidor asked, his interest now picking up, “Do you mean like investigations?”

“I guess,” I answered. “We’ll just have to see what comes up.”

So over dinner that evening, we decided what our advert should say. We sat bunched together at the end of the vast kitchen table, our voices echoing off the huge stone walls. It was more like a banqueting hall than a kitchen. We didn’t eat much, which was another thing about being dead — we had all lost our appetites. It wasn’t as if we needed food to stay alive. Everything had the same bland taste to it — like toast without butter and jam — just dull and boring. Food just got pushed to the edges of our plates, as if we were trying to kid ourselves that we had eaten. Maybe we only bothered to cook a meal each night to try and keep some normality to our newfound existence; after all, the only thing that any of us truly enjoyed was the taste of human blood.

Isidor pushed his plate to one side and said, “I know what the advert could say. What about something like this: ‘Got a problem? Need some help? Who you gonna call — Kiera Hudson!’ ”

Kayla almost choked on her food as she started to laugh. “Isidor, Kiera is meant to be an investigator — not a freaking Ghostbuster !”

“Okay, smart arse,” he said, looking a little hurt at his sister’s teasing. “You think of something.”

“Okay,” Kayla said thoughtfully. “How about, ‘Got a problem that needs to be shared? Got a secret you can’t tell anyone else? Then contact Kiera Hudson. Complete discretion assured!’ ”

“If you write something like that,” Isidor grimaced, “You will get a bunch of pervs come knocking at the door. There’ll be a queue of them in dirty raincoats from here to God knows where!”

With a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth, I looked at them across the table and said, “We need to keep it simple. You’re quite right, we don’t want any perverts or ghost hunters…”

“Busters ,” Kayla cut in.

“Them too,” I nodded, “but we don’t want to be investigating a string of missing pets, either. We all know that we’ve come back to a slightly different world than the one we left. Maybe there is someone out there who hasn’t forgotten everything — someone who remembers what the world used to be like.”

“So what have you got in mind?” Isidor asked me.